ARNSTADT — ART meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior.” He does not see that the two passages cannot properly be compared at all. In the one case the poet gives us a dramatic picture; in the other, a comment on a dramatic picture. Perhaps, indeed, the place Arnold held and still holds as a critic is due more to his exquisite felicity in expressing his views than to the penetration of his criticism. Nothing can exceed the easy grace of his prose at the best. It is conversational and yet absolutely exact in the structure of the sentences; and in spite of every vagary, his distinguishing note is urbanity. Keen-edged as his satire could be, his writing for the most part is as urbane as Addison’s own. His influence on contemporary criticism and contemporary ideals was considerable, and generally wholesome. His insistence on the necessity of looking at “the thing in itself,” and the need for acquainting oneself with “ the best that has been thought and said in the world,” gave a new stimulus alike to originality and industry in criticism; and in his own selection of subjects —such as Joubert, or the de Guerins—he opened a new world to a larger class of the better sort of readers, exercising in this respect an awakening influence in his own time akin to that of Walter Pater a few years afterwards. The comparison with Pater might indeed be pressed further, and yet too far. Both were essentially products of Oxford. But Arnold, whose description of that “ home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties,” is in itself almost a poem, had a classical austerity in his style that savoured more intimately of Oxford tradition, and an ethical earnestness even in his most flippant moments which kept him notably aloof from the more sensuous school of aesthetics. (t. w.-d.) Arnstadt, a town and watering-place of Germany, in the principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, 14 miles by rail S.S.W. from Erfurt, on the river Gera. The church of Our Lady was restored in 1884-86. Its manufactures embrace gloves, shoes, iron safes, confectionery, and especially beer and market-gardening. Arnstadt possesses an industrial school, and is much frequented in summer for its saline and other baths. It dates back to the 8th century. Population (1885), 11,537; (1895), 13,595. Arques, a town and railway station, arrondissement of St Omer, department of Pas-de-Calais, France, 31 miles in direct line N.W. of Arras. Near Arques, on the Canal de Neuffosses, is the Ascenseur des Fontinettes, a great hydraulic lift, completed in 1888, by which canal boats are enabled to avoid the series of locks constructed on the slope of the Fontinettes hill, to connect the Neuffosses with the Aa, at a difference of level of about 40 feet. Population, (1881), 2105; (1891), 1972 ; (1896), 2216, (comm.) 4355. Arrah, a town of British India, headquarters of Shahabad district, in the Patna division of Bengal, situated on a navigable canal connecting the river Sone with the Ganges. It is a station on the East Indian railway, 368 miles from Calcutta. In 1891 the population was 46,905. It has a high school with over 400 pupils. Arrah is famous for an incident in the Mutiny, when a dozen Englishmen, with 50 Sikhs, defended an ordinary house against an army of many thousand insurgents. A British regiment, despatched to their assistance from Dinapur, was disastrously repulsed; but they were ultimately relieved, after eight days’ continuous fighting, by a small force under Major (Sir Yincent) Eyre.
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Arran, an island of Buteshire, Scotland, situated in the Firth of Clyde. The area is 165 square miles. Agriculture and the entertainment of summer visitors are the principal industries, and herrings, haddocks, whitings, and lobsters are fished; in 1898 there were 39 boats in the island, manned by seventy-three fishermen, and the value of the catch was £1220. There is an extensive steamer service connecting with the Caledonian and Glasgow and South-Western railways. Many improvements have been carried out in the principal villages, and Lamlash, in particular, has been largely extended. Population (1901), 4779. Arras, chief town of department Pas-de-Calais, France, 109 miles N.N.E. of Paris, on railway from Paris to Dunkirk and Boulogne. Amongst public buildings to be noted are the restored Hotel de Ville, the Hopital St Jean, and the railway station. The last-named stands at one end of a fine thoroughfare, in the new quarter formed since the demolition of the fortifications. There are new boulevards, and statues of Yauban and of the Abbe Halluin (d. 1895). The manufacture of oils, especially poppy oil, and artistic and other metallurgical work, are now the leading industries, while textile manufactures are represented chiefly by hosiery. Population (1876), 21,689, (comm.) 21,689 ; (1886), 21,492 ; (1896), 20,599, (comm.) 21,086 ; (1901), 25,813. Arras^.. See Eritrea. Art Galleries.—An art gallery epitomizes so many phases of human thought and imagination that it connotes much more than a mere collection of paintings. In its technical and aesthetic aspect the gallery shows the treatment of colour, form, and composition. In its historical aspect we find the true portraits of great men of the past; we can observe their habits of life, their manners, their dress, the architecture of their times, and the religious worship of the period in which they lived. Begarded collectively, the art of a country epitomizes the whole development of the people that produced it. Most important of all is the emotional aspect of painting, which must enter less or more into every picture worthy of notice. To take examples from the British National Gallery: Pathos in its most intense degree will be found in Francia’s “ Pieta” ; dignity in Velasquez’ portrait of Admiral Pareja; homeliness in Yan Eyck’s portrait of Jan Arnolfini and his wife; the interpretation of the varying moods of nature in the work of Turner or Hobbema; nothing can be more devotional than the canvases of Bellini or his Umbrian contemporaries. So also the ruling sentiments of mankind—mysticism, drama, and imagination are the keynotes of other great conceptions of the artist. All this may be at the command of those who visit the art gallery ; but without patience, care, and study the higher meaning will be lost to the spectator. The picture which “ tells its own story ” is often the least didactic, for it has no inner or deeper lesson to reveal; it gives no stimulus or training to the eye, quick as that organ may be—segnius irritant animos—to translate sight into thought. In brief, the painter asks that his i)dos may be shared as much as possible by the man who looks at the painting—the art above all others in which it is most needful to share the master’s spirit if his work is to be fully appreciated. So, too, the art gallery, recalling the gentler associations of the past amidst surroundings of harmonious beauty and its attendant sense of comfort, is essentially a place of rest for the mind and eye. In the more famous galleries where the wealth of paintings allows a grouping of pictures according to their respective schools, one may choose the country, the epoch, the style, or even the emotion best suited to one’s taste. According to this theory, though
